Tom Holland has announced that he is taking a year off from acting. This news follows his completion of the dark Apple+ miniseries The Crowded Room in which he plays a character based on a real-life rapist.
Speaking exclusively to Extra, Holland admitted:
“It was it was a tough time for sure. We were exploring certain emotions that I have definitely never experienced before, and then on top of that being a producer dealing with the day-to-day kind of problems that come with any film set added that extra level of pressure.
“I love the learning curve of becoming a producer. I’m no stranger to hard work. I’ve always sort of lived by this idea that hard work is good work. I really enjoyed it, but then again, the show did break me. There did come a time where I was sort of like, ‘I need to have a break.’ I disappeared. I went to Mexico for a week and had some time on a beach. And I’m now taking a year off, and that is a result of how difficult this show was.”
The film deals with mental health and now it seems that Holland needs to take a break for his own mental health. He stated that he has already been taking time off to spend time with his family and live a somewhat normal life.
“I’ve been seeing my family. I’ve been seeing my friends. I’ve been playing golf. I’ve been, you know, going to the garden center and buying plants and doing my best to keep them alive and all that sort of stuff. I’ve just been trying to be, you know, regular bloke from Kingston and just relax.”
In The Crowded Room, Tom Holland plays Danny Sullivan, a fictionalized version of real-life serial rapist Billy Milligan, who was diagnosed with a disassociative personality disorder. The series is based on the nonfiction book The Minds of Billy Milligan. Milligan asserted that it was his alternate personalities that actually committed the crimes.
So yeah, that’s some heavy stuff and it isn’t shocking that Holland needs time to recharge after that. And as he stated, he also worked as a producer for the first time, so his workload was at least doubled on this project.
Holland has also been working pretty nonstop since his star shot up after taking on the role of Peter Parker/ Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He has stated that he has had talks with Marvel and Sony about returning but there are no concrete plans at this time. This also coincides with the current writers’ strike (and possibly upcoming actors’ and producers’ strikes), so there won’t be any work on that for a while anyway.
He is also set to star as famous actor/ singer/ dancer Fred Astaire in a biopic, but that appears to still be in pre-production and once again, may have been paused due to the strike.
If you want to check out The Crowded Room, it is now available on Apple TV+.
